Our sorry state of incarceration
Gov. Sarah Sanders is enmeshed in another dispute of her own making. This time it involves the Arkansas State Board of Corrections which, pursuant to the Arkansas Constitution, oversees Arkansas’ prison system.
That contention, involving expanding Arkansas prison capacity by 500 beds to house more inmates, raises questions of constitutional prerogative which will be settled in court. In the meantime, it beseeches greater questions about the state of incarceration in Arkansas.
Today, Arkansas has more people incarcerated per capita than anywhere else in America, yet it also has the highest violent crime rate and the fifth highest property crime rate in the nation. Black people are over-represented considerably in our state prison system; 13 percent of those incarcerated statewide are over the age of 55.
These statistics are alarming. Arkansas’ approach to crime, rooted in the theory of removing offenders from society as a means of social control, is not working. That is because accelerated incarceration is not evidence of effective crime prevention. While it may be that Governor Sanders is ill-equipped to create strategies that lead to meaningful reform, including drawing down the prison population without increasing the crime rate, it is worthwhile to try to understand why our society, writ large, has a disjointed conception of crime in relation to punishment.
To that end, perhaps America’s most consequential mistake came in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson missed the opportunity to refocus American attitudes towards curing civil disorders in America when he ignored recommendations of his advisory board, the Kerner Commission, which recommended, as a component of “The Great Society,” that the federal government invest in creation of millions of jobs, investment in urban schools, and the expansion of government assistance for housing, food, and child care.
Instead, he steered America’s attention towards policing, a trend his predecessors followed.
The Nixon era ushered in the popular “War on Crime”; President Ronald Reagan amplified the impactful “War on Drugs” mass media campaign. President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, while well-intentioned, furthered America’s present-day affection for imprisonment and accelerated our nation’s drift away from early and more proactive carceral attitudes towards rehabilitation. While Clinton’s policies did not create mass incarceration, they led to more state mandatory minimum criminal laws and longer sentencing practices nationwide.
As a result of this decades-long bipartisan and generally mistaken approach, today America imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, including millions for nonviolent offenses, notably drug possession. This in turn relegates these offenders, a vast majority of whom are ethnic minorities, to the “prison label” and thereby “second class status,” as Michelle Alexander argues in “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
Shame, stigma, and polarization, or outright social exclusion, follow people for the rest of their lives.
Crime has an origin story rooted in common social and economic characteristics. Poverty, a lack of upward social mobility, and racial disparity are considerable factors as are the harsh yet practical realities regarding the profitability of the drug trade. And when it comes to violent crime, there is overwhelming evidence that very few commit violence without first surviving it.
This suggests embracing new strategies for an early age audience, including peaceful conflict resolution strategies in schools, access to mental health professionals and programs, and a discipline structure that invites repair rather than admonishment will help teach young people how to resolve conflict peacefully while also affording them time and space to discuss the trauma happening in their daily lives, including at home.
Arkansas needs wholesale prison reform if our state endeavors to improve its standing in relation to America and the rest of the world. No, considering meaningful reform is not equivalent to being “soft on crime,” an epithet popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to the Vietnam War protests and the rise of the Black Panther movement. Rather, doing so recognizes the opportunity to re-examine whether our state’s over-reliance on imprisonment is effective public policy.
If Governor Sanders is a serious leader, she will respect the Arkansas Constitution and refocus her efforts, perhaps with the help of the attorney general, to advance a meaningful approach to prison reform that embraces problem-solving rather than petty politics.
This should include alleviating Arkansas’ existing prison population by developing a pathway for nonviolent offenders to be systematically released from prison, including everyone above the age of 60 (elder prisoners are the most expensive to care for); expanding specialty courts (drug court, mental health court, and veterans treatment court) to all 75 Arkansas counties; narrowing indeterminate state sentences, particularly for drug possession, to diminish the subjectivity of parole and disparity in punishment; and banning private prisons whose for-profit model is predicated on the promise of full occupancy.
Additionally, Arkansas should re-invigorate its approach to rehabilitation by, among other things, greater investment in education and skills training; improved reintegration services, notably workforce placement and housing assistance to destigmatize incarceration; paying prisoners a minimum wage for the dignity of their labor; and reconsidering the current approach to juvenile justice in light of the fact that, statistically, those who have been in detention once are far more likely to commit another offense.
The lack of correlation between crime and punishment is not new, but that does not mean Arkansas is absolved of the need to alter its approach. More to the point, providing meaningful economic and social opportunities has, multo tempore, proven to be the best answer to crime prevention.
Tax cuts for the wealthy will not invigorate distressed communities where crime pervades, any more than vouchers for private schools which, combined with the current dispute with the Board of Corrections, suggests quite convincingly that the Sanders administration is still a very long way from a solution.